A Blog from David Crump
Israel is one of the most militarized societies in the world.
Military service is compulsory for all graduating high school seniors. Everyone remains a member of the military reserves and is eligible for a call back into active service well into middle-age.
Israeli dissident, Miko Peled, son of a famous Israeli general and former soldier himself, explains how this militarization of civil society affects Israel’s culture and indoctrinates its people.
Below is as worthwhile conversation between Judge Andew Nepolitano and Professor John Mearsheimer about the current war in Ukraine.
Mearsheimer opens by explaining the two competing perspectives on this war. He then explains why the prevailing Western/US perspective is not only wrong-headed but extremely dangerous.
The US public is the #1 financier of this needless bloodbath — to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars. It is well worth your time to hear what Professor Mearsheimer has to say.
After listening, I urge you to call your elected representatives and urge them to insist that (1) all parties to the conflict begin immediate peace negotiations, and (2) the US stop funding Ukrainian weaponry and intelligence.
I am thinking back to that childhood adage about the hypocrisy of pointing fingers. Remember? When I point my finger at someone else, I always have three fingers pointing back at myself.
Funny how we tend to forget the wisdom of childhood.
Instead of pointing fingers, let’s look in the mirror and pay attention to our own faces.
Today Andrea Mazzarino, co-founder of Brown University’s Costs of War Project, has an article at TomDispatch analyzing the domestic blowback of
America’s addiction to perpetual war.
A nation cannot keep itself on a continual war footing, as American has done for the past 20 years, without infecting its citizenry with a self-destructive “us vs. them, where’s the enemy?” attitude. It foments tribalism which spreads like a disease.
Those killer drones will come home to roost.
The article is titled “How War Divides Us.” Below is an excerpt:
As many Americans condemn Russia for its grim invasion, it’s easy to forget that for more than two decades now, others in our world have viewed our post-9/11 foreign policy in much the way we now view Russia’s — as imperialist and expansionist. After all, the U.S. invaded two countries, while using the 9/11 attacks to launch a war on terror globally that metastasized into U.S. counterterror activities in 85 nations.
This has, in fact, been the violent American century, but even less recognized here is how our war on terror helped cause us to turn on one another. It injected fear and the weaponry that goes with it into a country where relatively prosperous, connected communities like mine would have had the potential to expand and offer other Americans far more robust support.
If we don’t find a way to pay more attention to why this didn’t happen and just how we did so much negatively to ourselves, then a police-state mentality and its potential companion, civil war (like the ones we’ve seen in countries we sought to “democratize” by force of arms) may, in the end, become the deepest reality of an ever more polarized America. Of that, Donald Trump is but a symptom.
You can read the entire article here.
